Without this woman, my life stinks

When I got married, I had an opportunity to say a few words at the wedding reception about my wife and told everyone this story about the beginning of our relationship.


When I first started dating my future wife, I had a job where I took my lunch to work, usually a sandwich. As a bachelor, I minimised time spent in the kitchen, my interests lying elsewhere. As a consequence, I would ofttimes "discover" a sandwich then eat it for months at a time until I discovered another sandwich.

At this time, I was eating tuna fish. I was also trying to be conscious of the environment so I was following a regular routine of collecting my cans then taking them down to the recycling bin at the apartment building where I was living.

One time, my then future wife was visiting me and noticed a plastic shopping bag on the floor in one corner of my kitchenette. I explained how I would gather a number of cans together over a few days or a week then I would take the entire bag downstairs for recycling. However, I added the warning to not open the plastic bag as the contents after a few days would start to smell and the odour was anything but pleasant. Without a word, she goes over and picks up the bag, takes out the cans and begins rinsing them out in the kitchen sink. I am standing there watching her at first totally perplexed by what she's doing. I then realize that by rinsing the cans out, I would be avoiding having them possibly stink up the kitchen. There would be no organic matter to decompose, there would only be the metal.

I was absolutely stunned. This was a complete revelation to me. Up until that moment, I had been looking at the cans as garbage per se, something one threw out, and does anybody "clean" their garbage before throwing it out? The idea to just simply rinse them out had never occurred to me and now, realizing the wisdom of her actions, I started to chuckle at how dumb, how short sighted I had been in dealing with this issue of stinky cans.

As I now tell the story, it was at that moment that I knew I had to marry this woman because "without her, my life stinks".

2010-06-04